Category: teaching

The Class

Last week was the second summer course at the Yale Center for British Art, Not Your Parent’s Sketchbook, a class for children and teens. We used the iPad as a starting point to create work based on art that we saw as we explored the museum collection. Thank you to all the support and assistance of Jaime, Arianna, and Berclee and to Sarah for bringing in the artists, Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman.

The Apps

We used the app Brushes Redux (for drawing and painting) and the Stop Motion app to make some of our creations come to life. Students explored a variety of drawing, painting and music apps on the iPads. One particular favorite during free time was the Magic Piano App. If you used a different app on the BAC iPads that I do not mention here, please email me its description and I will track it down for you.

We drew from life the first day, an apple. We learned about layers and brushes and the cool play-back feature that animates your drawing. We visited the Hockney paintings on the 3rd floor and watched a short video about his process.

Specimen Sculptures

We visited Katherine Morling‘s Butterfly Box, and some specimens of Articles in Common Use, which made us curious what we would include in such a modern specimen box and whether or not our collection would be as puzzling to the people who created the box from the era that was on display. We made white specimen sculptures with model-magic and used black marker to draw. This was just the starting point, as students made the sculptures come to life by adding color, and then by making stop motion animations of their sculpture.

We made Stop Motion Videos

Arianna, our in-house stop-motion expert, cut together this video which showcases many of the stop motion videos the students created with us. You can view it in our Google Drive collection here:

Stop Motion Inspiration

Cyanotype Selfies

On the last day, we were visited by artists Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman whose work we saw on the 2nd floor. It was such a treat to meet the artists in person whose work we had just seen. They spoke about the choices they made in their process and we showed them the cyanotype selfies the students made in the style of their work. To make the selfies, we learned how to download botanical drawings from the YCBA database of artworks. This is a wonderful resource and there are high-resolution images of much of the collection, some of which are even marked for public domain use.

If you were a student for the week and you have a question about a particular work that we saw, an app that we used, or artwork that you created which is not in the shared folder, please email me and describe the piece to the best of your ability and the docents and I will try to track down the information for you.

I feel like we just scratched the surface of what is possible to do in digital drawing, painting, collage, and animation and hope that the students download art and apps and continue to explore and create over the summer and return to the YCAB to visit the artworks again in the future.

Friday wrapped up my iPad drawing course at the Yale Center for British Arts, Paint Like Hockney. It was a class for children and teens, using the iPad and iPhone app Brushes Redux to explore some of the exhibits at the YCBA.

I want to post here and send an email to the parents and students as well, to recap some of the many artworks that we visited. If you were a student for the week and you have a question about a particular work that we saw that I don’t mention in this post, please email me and describe the piece to the best of your ability and the docents and I will try to track down the information for you.

Our Docents

I want to thank the docents, Arianna, who printed so many pictures for us this week and even created some beautiful work herself and Berclee, who asked the students such interesting questions on our rounds through the galleries.

The Apps

We used Brushes Redux. It is the iPad and iPhone app that David Hockney used, and it is pretty intuitive, and free at the App store.

We were going to use Procreate, which is a similar app with more digital tools, such as straight line and text and selection tools you might miss from Photoshop. It is 4.99 at the app store. It requires a more recent version of the iPad than we had.

The iPads were also equipped with more fun Apps, 53 Paper, which is a sketchbook app, the Josef Albers color app, and more, if you recall using something else during your visit that I did not mention here, feel free to email me, and I will answer to the best of my ability.

The Projects

We drew from life the first day, an apple. We learned about layers and brushes and the cool play back feature that animates your drawing. We visited the Hockney paintings on the 3rd floor and watched a short video about his process. There was also a wonderfully vibrant (our word for the week) Howard Hodgkins, called Venice, Evening.

Cyanotype Selfies

On the second day, we created a botanical cyanotype selfie in the style of the artists Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman whose work we saw on the 2nd floor. We also saw work there that was very intriguing, Katherine Morling‘s Butterfly Box, and some specimens of Articles in Common Use, which made us curious what we would include in such a modern specimen box and whether or not our collection would be as puzzling to the people who created the box from the era that was on display.

Cyanotype Selfie

Cyanotype Selfie

Cyanotype Selfie

Cyanotype Selfie

Cyanotype Selfie

To make our cyanotype selfies, we learned to search and download botanical drawings from the YCBA database of artworks. This is a wonderful resource and there are high-resolution images of much of the collection, some of which are even marked for public domain use.

Drawing from Sculpture

On our third day, we spent the entire time drawing from sculpture on the 4th floor of the gallery. Our docent Barclee spoke about the shapes and textures in the stairwells, the open views and the restful large windows to the outside world that Louis Kahn planned into the architecture of this building. Drawing from sculpture is one of my very favorite things to do on the iPad and we found and drew some horses and a greyhound. We used the techniques of gesture, negative shapes, finding simple forms within the complex body shapes of the animals, and using a variety of styles, including specialized brushes, layers, and transparent washes of greys.

The horse sculptures were Before the Race and After the Race by John Willis Good, and Adrian Jones’ Gone Away. There was a fourth horse sculpture of Queen Victoria by Thomas Thornycroft (whose name just sounds too British for sure!)

The greyhound in the Long Gallery is by John R. Skeaping. A student also pointed out a lovely energetic painting by Eileen Hogan of the poet Ian Finlay.

More Digital Art tools

Students who had experience with other painting and drawing tools on the computer or iPad shared what they liked about each. We spoke of Photoshop and Illustrator (great for vector graphics which one student used to make a design for a tshirt) and of a free app for the computer called Fire Alpaca, that one of the students loved, which has line tools and easy to use animation tools. I spoke of a watercolor app for iPad called Auryn Ink.

Thank you!

I feel like we just scratched the surface of what is possible to do in digital drawing, painting and collage, and hope that the students download art and apps and continue to explore and create over the summer and return to the YCAB to visit the artworks again in the future.

Click to download the Peabody Kit. This is the handout for sketching, scavenger hunt, and doodling which was an activity hosted by the Connecticut Humanities launch party for the Great Connecticut Caper that was held at the Yale Peabody Museum.

This past weekend, I held my annual Drawing Bootcamp at Creative Arts Workshop. We cram as many beginning drawing skills into 3 hour blocks as possible.

For some, this is the first experience drawing standing at an easel. Most of us are used to drawing smaller, sitting at a desk or in a little sketchbook. Standing while drawing allows you to make marks using your whole arm, so you can create longer more fluid lines in your drawing.

During one exercise, we focused on using the negative shapes, the spaces between objects, to help us measure the proportions of a ladder.

The last picture shows a student hanging up a collaboratively drawn drawing. My students were so nice to humor me with this request. They each added to the drawing with a different color marker, relying on the previous person’s measurements and marks.

Online Printing Resources for Artists

Last week for Creative Arts Workshop: Artists Portfolios for the Web, we talked about print solutions to go along with your website.

Business Cards and Postcards

I discussed moo.com for small and regular business cards, I love moo because I can pick up to 100 different images rather than settling on one. It is always fun to see which ones visitors prefer to take at Open Studios. It gives you feedback about what work people like without necessarily putting them or you on the spot.

You can use moo.com with your flickr.com photo sharing account or upload images directly.

I mentioned Modern Postcard too, as a quality shop to get an affordable and larger run of postcards or business cards.

Printed Artists Portfolios and Books

We looked at a few sample printed portfolio books that Ken Lovell made. Chatbooks makes cool books from Instagram and Facebook feeds. They are square and well-made and inexpensive. $8 a paperback. Sweet!

Speaking of Instagram– it is a photo sharing service which you mainly upload from your mobile device so take that into account when figuring out images for your book.

We saw examples from Lulu and Blurb also. More variety, and you can upload your own pdf and sell online, even offer your book through Amazon!

These are great proof-in-concept places, because it is so affordable to print just one copy and have the book online if you need more, or if you want to shop your book around for wider publishing or to use as a gift in your Kickstarter.

Artists Funding

Speaking of Kickstarter, and we did, we looked at how different individuals and teams use Kickstarter to fund projects or goals. There are also sites like GoFundMe and Indigogo that I forgot to mention. Browse through and see if there is a site and a format that would fit your particular project or needs. You could Kickstart a book or give supporters handmade work to fund a studio renovation. We touched briefly on Patreon as an artist’s tip jar as well.

Video

If you end up creating an appeal for funding, you probably end up needing to make a little video telling the story of your project. Upload it to Youtube or Vimeo.

Questions

If you have any other suggestions or questions about these services, leave a comment.